


A Fine Distraction

by dualwielder, VIII_XIII



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Inception Reverse Big Bang Challenge, M/M, Post-Inception
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-05
Updated: 2013-10-05
Packaged: 2017-12-28 11:15:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/991386
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dualwielder/pseuds/dualwielder, https://archiveofourown.org/users/VIII_XIII/pseuds/VIII_XIII
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>"What are you doing with that?" Arthur asked, resisting the urge to slap Eames's hands away from the briefcase like a child with a favored toy. Eames was close enough that all he'd have to do would be to reach out a hand.</i>
</p>
<p>  <i>"We're going to do some training exercises," Eames said in a cheerful tone that filed away at Arthur's teeth. As far as Arthur was concerned, there was a very short list of things to be cheerful about, and “training exercises” weren't on it.</i></p>
<p>Eames might be an asshole, but the fact that they can't get out of Canada is all Arthur's fault.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Fine Distraction

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Inception Reverse Bang, for [iamnotnormal's lovely work](http://i.imgur.com/7YeYYHQ.jpg).

Arthur had never thought of himself as a person who had a problem with failure. He liked to consider himself a pragmatist, ready to meet his own shortcomings as well as his own successes head-on. As it was turning out, however, there was a breaking point to everything, including personal outlooks and life philosophies, and he’d finally found his.

He hadn’t freaked out over the Cobol debacle. He’d stayed level-headed; he’d worked to fix it. Perhaps it had helped that the big price was on Dom’s head and nobody cared that much about Arthur, in the same way that every supervillain worked day and night to kill Batman but only thought about Robin if they could suspend him over a tank of acid-spitting sharks as bait. But even after his own big screw-up on the Fischer job – the biggest screw-up of his career to that point – he’d never found it in him to feel too bad. Things would have been fine if Dom hadn’t been an asshole, but of course Dom had been an asshole, so Arthur hadn’t beaten himself up about it.

But then things went wrong on Arthur’s watch. Terribly wrong. Unsalvageably wrong, so wrong they ended up holed up in Toronto in an apartment with stained blackout curtains and thin mattresses with broken springs, banged up and bruised and utterly confused as to how things could have gone so “breathtakingly pear-shaped” (Eames’s words, which he’d shouted at Arthur while they were busy being shot at) the moment they set foot on Fortran Mining corporate property.

They were left to wonder for about eighteen hours after managing to lose their tail and skip town to find somewhere to lie low until they formulated a plan. “I’ve received an email,” Eames said from where he was sprawled out on the sofa with the same ancient, wheezing laptop he’d had since they first met. Arthur looked up from his own computer. He’d been trying to do a bit of digging to piece together what, precisely, had happened, but so far he hadn’t reached any sort of useful dirt.

“What kind of email?”

“The gloating kind. It would appear – if I am parsing this correctly – that this job was, in fact, a setup.”

Inside, Arthur’s organs began to go a bit runny; he could tell they were because there was a hot, unpleasant liquid feeling seeping from every part of him into the pit of his stomach. He felt a bit hot. He felt a bit ill. Outwardly, he showed none of it. He just pursed his lips for a moment, his nostrils flaring, and then said, “By whom?”

“Lady by the name of Auvray.”

“Patricia Auvray? The extractor?”

“Bingo,” Eames said, managing to make the word sound surprisingly humorless. “I, ah… I worked a job with her and her fiancé a few years ago; she was lead, he took point. Simple extraction, went off without a hitch. And…”

“And?” Arthur supplied when Eames didn’t get on with it quickly enough. Eames almost never hesitated to say anything, and now was really not the time for him to suddenly cultivate a sense of shame.

“And I may have absconded with something.”

That did not do much for the queasy feeling Arthur was attempting to deal with; in fact, it made it much worse. His voice was a low, dangerous growl when he added, “You stole a payout, Eames?”

Eames looked up, and he had the decency to appear almost comically scandalized. “No!” he exclaimed. “What kind of bastard do you think I am? I stole her fiancé.”

Arthur just stared. He opened his mouth to say something, then realized that he couldn’t think of a thing to say to that and closed it again. He was only aware of how angry he must have looked because Eames was giving him much the same look Philippa had given Dom when all of the cupcakes had gone missing at Dom’s under-attended and painfully awkward Fourth of July barbecue.

“Jettisoned him in Berlin shortly thereafter,” Eames continued finally, seemingly just to break the silence. “Couldn’t stand him any longer. Even you would have found him high-maintenance. Guess he never made his way back…”

Nearly knocking his chair over in the process, Arthur stood up and turned on his heel, and a moment later his bedroom door slammed.

He didn’t come out until the following morning. Eames, in his undershirt and stupid boxers with tiny dachsunds on them – apparently what he’d been wearing under the clothes they escaped in – found him sitting at the little linoleum-topped kitchen table with a mug of coffee in his hands. “Look, Arthur,” he said immediately, taking the seat across from him. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize,” Arthur said. One of Eames’s eyebrows shot up, probably because there was no malice, no irritation, and no passive-aggressive note in his voice. Arthur set his coffee down on the table, keeping it between his hands, turning the mug between his fingers for lack of anything more to do. “I’m not angry. You might be kind of an asshole…”

He paused for a moment, head lowered, watching Eames through his eyelashes, but Eames just waved a hand to concede the point. “Which everyone already knows.”

“…and I’m not about to get into the sexual, social, or ethical politics of your decision to steal a fiancé you didn’t even like very much…”

“Which isn’t anyone’s business anyhow.”

“…but the underlying point remains that even if you are a fiancé-stealing asshole, no person should reasonably expect an elaborate murder attempt in retaliation for such actions. So. This isn’t your fault.”

Eames stared at him for a few moments, seemingly trying to wrap his head around that, around Arthur voluntarily absolving him of blame. He sat back in his chair at last, head cocked a bit, and said, “Well. I’m glad you feel that way.”

“It’s mine.”

“Now hold on—” Eames said, sitting up again, but Arthur was already on his feet, because he didn’t exactly relish the idea of arguing that point just then, and in retrospect he probably shouldn’t have said it at all.

He deposited his coffee mug in the sink and said, “We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us. We both need new identities if we’re going to leave the country; the fact that Auvray is in the industry makes it too dangerous to bank on her not having found out about any of our current ones. Please get started on that. I need to call Dom and have him get us some cash that can’t be traced or you’re going to be wearing those ridiculous boxers every day for the foreseeable future.”

“I’ll have you know these were a gift from my mother.”

“Bullshit. You don’t speak to your mother,” Arthur said as he left Eames sitting there alone in the kitchen.

The end of Arthur’s pragmatism and the beginning of his cycle of self-chastisement started that day. Dom – who was, for all of his personal and psychological shortcomings, extremely resourceful and well-connected – managed to have a sizeable sum of cash in Arthur’s hands by lunch.

“Do you need help?” Dom asked when Arthur called, using the burner phone he always kept in his laptop bag, to thank him. “I could call Saito.”

“Saito is not some sort of get-out-of-jail free card, Dom. Offers like that come along once in a lifetime. Eames and I can handle this; we’ll figure it out. Hell, I’m sure he’s been in much worse.”

“But—”

Arthur didn’t raise his voice, but he might have been just a bit snappish when he said, “Stay out of it. You’re retired, and there are two very good reasons for that.”

Errands needed running. Everything they’d brought with them on this job was gone, save the PASIV and what they’d had in their respective business professional messenger bags (“Are we masquerading as university students?” Eames had asked; “Messenger bags are the new briefcase,” Arthur had told him) when they skipped town. Arthur pictured his Savile Row suit languishing in the lost items room of the Montreal Westin, and his heart ached. Contrary to what Eames thought, he only owned the one.

He thought about the initial meetings he’d had with their client – a go-between, he now knew – replaying the conversations in his head as though surely the client must have slipped up somehow, must have unwittingly indicated to him that something was rotten in the province of Quebec, and it hadn’t been the questionable poutine they’d discussed payment terms over. Somehow, he thought, he must have missed something. He thought about this while he was in a drugstore buying toothbrushes and deodorant and hair gel, in between feeling annoyed that his not-even-remotely cheap shampoo was lost with his Savile Row suit and debating what kind of toothpaste Eames would find least objectionable and wondering if maybe Eames didn’t care and in reality Arthur was the only person on earth who was picky about toothpaste.

He thought about the due diligence and preliminary research he’d done on this job and about the process of vetting the client while he filled a cart at Target with clothing. Arthur gravitated toward shopping online and Eames, presumably, gravitated toward thrift shops or the kind of pretentious resale boutiques where hipsters went to buy mustard-colored corduroy high-waisted pants; but this was quick and easy, and it wasn’t as though they were going to be having any client meetings, reconnaissance, or fancy dinners anytime soon.

He thought about the background check he’d run on Roderick Leslie, the nominal client, as he dumped eight random t-shirts into the cart. Leslie was unquestionably the person he’d claimed to be: a project manager in R&D at one of Fortran Mining’s major competitors. What his connection was to Patricia Auvray was a mystery, but there must have been something. Maybe he was a former client of hers.

On the clearance shelves there were boxers with, of all things, stupid little ducks on them. Arthur stared at them, frowning, then picked up every remaining pair in what he presumed was Eames’s size and tossed them in the cart with everything else.

Arthur thought, while he was at the grocery store, about the stack of paperwork he’d shredded and dumped in bins all along the alley behind their hotel a few nights prior, the evening before the job was meant to go off. In his head he went through what had been in that stack, though he found it hard to concentrate because he was wondering, for some reason, whether Eames had any dietary restrictions or allergies. Trying to recall which Fortran departmental internal email accounts he’d searched and how far back on each was difficult when he was staring at the frozen food and wondering how much he could fit in the apartment’s questionably functional freezer and how hard Eames would or would not judge him for his inability to cook.

_Maybe I should reconsider wiping my digital research before each job. If they get their hands on my laptop, they’ve already caught me anyway_ , he thought, frowning, and then immediately added, _But how likely am I to ever be in a situation like this again, and what are the odds that Eames needs or wants to eat gluten-free frozen macaroni?_

In the end, he told himself that Eames could go find his own food if he didn’t like Arthur’s and bought the same things he usually bought in the short periods of time he was living at home. Eames peered into the bags when he got back, picked up a chicken pot pie, and frowned. “I’m a pescetarian, Arthur,” he said, and Arthur leaned against the nearest wall just so he could knock his head back against it.

“Ooh, Pringles,” Eames added, and he left with the entire can.

Arthur didn’t see him again until that evening, when Eames reappeared from his room and leaned in the living room doorway, staring until Arthur looked up. “What are you working on?”

“Re-gathering the information I burned in Montreal.”

“And what good do you suppose that will do?”

Arthur’s nostrils flared a little bit, and he almost immediately shot back, “Why didn’t you ever tell me you’re a pescetarian?”

“Because it’s not important,” Eames replied smoothly, as though he’d entirely expected a non-sequitur out of Arthur at that juncture. “But what you’re doing right now is.”

“Do you need help with something, Eames?”

“No. No, I’ve got it all under control,” Eames said, and there was an obvious note of reluctance in his voice, but he left it at that.

 

Not knowing how he’d failed was eating at Arthur more than he’d anticipated. Retracing his steps and re-obtaining documents were no small task, but they couldn’t distract him indefinitely. Inevitably, he’d take a break, or his thoughts would wander, and they’d always come back to the same place: the missing piece of the puzzle, the information he’d neglected to find. He knew who sold them out, and he knew why, and he even knew how, but he didn’t know what he’d missed that could have told them this whole job was a fraud, and he had a feeling it was something glaringly and painfully obvious. 

Arthur was not very good at putting things aside, especially when the things were mistakes in his work he knew he’d made. It was a day later, while he was in the midst of going through a gig and a half of mass-downloaded emails, that Eames started taking out the PASIV and setting it up. That made Arthur's eyes twitch just a little because he didn't like other people touching his PASIV, even if that other person was Eames and Arthur trusted Eames with his life.

"What are you doing with that?" Arthur asked, resisting the urge to slap Eames's hands away from the briefcase like a child with a favored toy. Eames was close enough that all he'd have to do would be to reach out a hand.

"We're going to do some training exercises," Eames said in a cheerful tone that filed away at Arthur's teeth. As far as Arthur was concerned, there was a very short list of things to be cheerful about, and “training exercises” weren't on it.

"Why?" Arthur asked, narrowing his eyes, because the idea sounded stupid, but most of Eames's ideas did sound stupid when he first said them, and over the course of their post-inception, Cobb-less career, Arthur had generally learned to give them a chance instead of immediately arguing. Unless they involved large numbers of explosives, and sometimes even then.

"Because it'll keep us on our toes, and it'll keep you from going crazy and staring holes into the wall, and it might even be a learning experience." Eames straightened and looked at Arthur. He was holding an IV and staring at him in that insufferable way he did when he knew there was no use really fighting him, because he was right and he was going to get his way regardless.

"Are you telling me you really can’t spare twenty minutes?" he added, and Arthur couldn’t very well say no.

Eames brought him under and instead of a bunker or a blown-out stretch of city street as Arthur would have expected out of something Eames labeled a “training exercise”, they were in some sort of... well. A cabin, a farmhouse perhaps, antiquated and low-lit. The floorboards were rough-hewn, and there was a fire burning in a stone hearth; the furnishings were modest but clean, the bed made neatly with an elaborate quilt. Through the windows it appeared to be twilight.

He turned around to find Eames behind him, setting a large, worn wooden case on a dining table illuminated by a few candles. He certainly wasn't dressed like he had been on the last few jobs; he had on a cravat, neatly tied under a cropped leather jacket, his trousers tucked into knee-high, mud-caked leather boots.

"I," Arthur said, and he stopped, because he wasn't sure what verb to put there at all. He was baffled. And at that moment, a slightly warped, moisture-stained mirror caught the corner of his eye, hanging on the wall nearby, and when he turned to examine it, he caught sight of his own clothing and the word, “What?” came tumbling out before he could stop it. He was wearing a cassock that was cut like some sort of trenchcoat with an unnecessary number of straps holding it closed, complete with a clerical collar.

"What is this?" he asked, and Eames just glanced up at him, his eyelashes dark and his eyes a cloudy grey in the firelight. He smirked a little, then thumbed the releases on the box in front of him and opened it. There was an array of items set into neat velvet-lined indentations inside, and before Arthur could even properly examine all of them, Eames was thrusting a heavy crucifix on a very substantial chain into his hands. It seemed to be gilded brass, elaborately engraved, and Arthur just blinked at it for a second as Eames picked up what looked to be a revolver, albeit one trussed up in metal and ebony, and flipped it open, taking out one of the rounds to examine it.

His smile was razor-sharp as he held up, between two fingers, a silver bullet. "Thought you might be tired of the same-old same-old. Jobs get so monotonous, don’t they?”

Arthur's mind felt as though it were continually trying to jump start itself and failing - every time he thought he had wrapped his head around this and understood it, it gave a shuddering clang and shut down again, and he was relegated to standing there, staring at Eames with what he was sure was a very stupid expression on his face. He often felt Eames engendered this sort of reaction in him, though, and it was one of the main reasons he felt so off-balance around him - Eames made it difficult to think simply by the act of existing in Arthur's space, and it didn't even always have to do with things he said or did.

But he made a valiant effort, as he always did, and the casting of his eyes over the accouterments assembled was one last purposeful revving of his mental engines; disbelief was not an excuse for being dense. "You...made me a priest," he said, and some of that disbelief crept into his voice, but mostly it was flat as he stared at Eames. "And who are you, Abraham Van Helsing?"

Eames shook his head, still grinning, though there was something in his eyes that Arthur almost caught and understood but was gone before he could fully arrange it in his mind. If he didn't know any better, for a moment he would have thought Eames looked just a tiny bit unsure.

"I don’t watch movies," Eames said dismissively, finishing the loading of his gun and then stashing it away into his jacket.

"There’s a book you might have heard of, you know. And… and you gave me a crucifix."

"A crucifix with a little button on the side."

"Unless the button fires bullets, I don't know that I'm going to be all that excited about it."

Eames rolled his eyes and scoffed. "Really, you have no imagination, but if needs must," he said, and waved a hand at the box; when Arthur came around to look, there was still a number of pistols and various other small firearms. Arthur took one of these as well as a long-barreled gun that more closely resembled an elaborately decorated sawed-off shotgun than anything Arthur had ever seen in real life. Eames apparently really liked his embellishments. He stowed both of these away in holsters beneath his coat he dreamed up expressly for that purpose, and when he looked up, Eames was watching him. His eyes were gleaming in a way that Arthur could only interpret as pleasure; he assumed it was because he was actually playing along. 

"All right, then? Off we go!" He was already almost out the door, looking exactly as though it was Christmas and all he'd asked for was a vampire uprising. "Don't forget about that button!"

Arthur did forget about it, until he had occasion to bludgeon someone's head in with the business end of the crucifix (it happened sooner than he'd expected) and his fingers happened to trigger it, and he quickly found it powered a long, silver and very spring-loaded spike that quickly and easily disappeared into an eye socket. He blinked, and pushed it again; the blade disappeared, and the body of the vampire he'd been struggling with quietly crumpled onto the grass.

"Huh."

Even after he'd already been having fun – which coincided with widespread panic in the village (Arthur was pretty sure it was supposed to be Romanian everyone was shouting in) once the sun had set and plunged everything into darkness illuminated only by the sizeable number of homes that were on fire – for some time, Arthur didn't notice it. He was a bit too busy being ambushed from behind in an alleyway, a cold, heavy body slamming into him, an arm wrapping around his neck. And then he was on the ground with the force of the impact, and even while he was in the middle of making a decision about how to handle this that went beyond grabbing the son of the bitch by the hair so he could keep his teeth away long enough to come up with a plan, his attacker was kicked off of him with a sickening crunch.

And then Eames was over him, pinning the vampire down to the ground beside Arthur with a heavy boot, and Arthur acted on instinct, pulling a stake out of his belt and slamming it down into the man's chest. He didn't even cringe as he had the previous couple of times as the sternum cracked beneath the blow of it, though his stomach still went a bit watery.

"Having fun," Eames said with a grin as Arthur got to his feet and ineffectually brushed some dirt off of himself, scowling down at the corpse on the ground.

"No," he replied.

"That wasn't a question. You're having fun," Eames said. Arthur listened to the screams, felt the heat of the fire engulfing the inn across the street and the sweat prickling on his temples in the crisp, autumnal night air, noticed all the blood drenching the right side of Eames's leather jacket.

"Whether or not I'm having fun is irrelevant," Arthur insisted, because he was having fun, but that didn't mean he had to admit it.

"Fun," Eames told him as he took the moment's reprieve to get out his revolver and reload it with glinting silver bullets he kept in a pouch on his belt, "is the most important part of any job. Did you think extraction was a public service?"

He flipped the chamber shut with a satisfying click, then grinned broadly at Arthur and was gone.

Arthur didn't know if he agreed with that or not. He was a realist and knew very well that many, many people had jobs they did not find fun in any way. Fun at one's job was a luxury, not a given, and Arthur was so unused to the idea and so rarely expected to have any fun that he struggled with the idea that he should make a place for it in the everyday of his responsibilities. Arthur liked extraction, of course, and he even found it thrilling sometimes, but to say it was all fun, a regular sort of fun that he looked forward to, was putting a bit of a stretch on it. That was something he'd always pictured Cobb saying, or Mal, once upon a time.

And yet, they did have a machine that operated and allowed one to control dreams, which (to most people) would be the absolute definition of fun. So why couldn't Arthur just admit that he was, in fact, having some?

Well, other than the fact that his job did not actually involve killing vampires. _But only_ , he could hear Eames saying, _because we don’t think to include vampires._

 

Almost as soon as they’d arrived, Arthur had contacted a friend for documents, specifically phone records. Arthur was not a morning person, even on good days, but the following day he awoke even later than usual, thanks to the excitement of the night before, to an email from said contact with multiple files attached, and was immediately irritated with himself for sleeping in. He spent most of his day poring over documents he hadn’t bothered gathering in the first place. Sure enough, he found what he was looking for - several calls, back and forth, before their job, between Auvray and Leslie.

"Fucking son of a bitch," he muttered, before sinking his head into his hands. This whole time, this whole goddamn time, all he had to do was vet their client just a little bit more fully, and this whole scenario might have been avoided. But he hadn't because it had been a big job, and Leslie worked for a big, well-known company, and he'd become complacent. He hadn't thought it was necessary, because they were successful, and that made them untouchable.

Only they weren't. They weren't untouchable, and Arthur wasn't infallible, and this was all his fault, just as he'd suspected. He'd only needed the proof.

Arthur felt, surprisingly enough, a curious numbness at the realization. He put the records away and simply sat there for what was surely hours, thinking and feeling nothing at all, because there was nothing to feel, and when Eames came back in the evening, Arthur didn't say much of anything to him at first beyond a brief greeting.

Eames noticed within five minutes. Arthur knew he noticed, because Eames was very perceptive, and Arthur was pretty poor at hiding things, and also because Eames began setting up the PASIV within fifteen minutes of coming back.

"I really don't feel like doing this again," Arthur said quietly; he felt tired, and ill, and defeated. He certainly didn't feel up to exterminating zombies or fighting giant robots or whatever it was Eames had in mind. Arthur didn't feel like doing anything.

"That's quite obvious," Eames replied, and did not stop what he was doing until he had all the elements pulled out and in place. "However, I have had a very long day, and I've actually been looking forward to this, and I would greatly like the pleasure of your company." He set the cannula on the table next to Arthur's hand, and sat back in his chair. Arthur furrowed his brow as he stared at it.

"That's emotional blackmail," he said. He hadn't thought Eames above emotional blackmail, it was just one of those things he never expected anyone to use until they did.

"You can look at it that way, if you insist on it. For me, I'm just asking nicely."

Arthur stared at him, and then down at the cannula, and there was something about the open way Eames said what he did that made Arthur feel like an ass, even though he was fairly certain Eames hadn't intended to make him feel like an ass. For once.

“You’re just trying to distract me,” he said, and with the act of saying it, he knew it was true. He didn’t need any confirmation.

“Us. I’m trying to distract us. Having you mope around all the time isn’t exactly fun for me, either.”

“We could play cards.”

“Don’t have a deck.”

“You just want an excuse to use the PASIV to live out your insane fantasies.”

Eames squinted at him. “Um. Yes. I thought that much was obvious.” And just like that, Arthur was out of retorts. There wasn’t much to say to that, anyway, so he picked up the needle, and slid it cleanly into his arm; he'd long since stopped needing tourniquets. 

"Besides," Eames said with a smile, "I think you'll like this one."

The first thing he noticed when he came to in Eames's dream was the very nice suit he was wearing. He was a little surprised, a little disappointed, and a little relieved, because he liked suits and this one was actually very expensive and stylish, bordering on formal. The disappointment, on the other hand, was an unexpected reaction, and Arthur had a difficult time parsing it. A suit meant the dream might not be as crazy or as interesting as the previous evening’s, and in spite of the fact that he thought he hadn't felt like doing that again, he apparently did.

Arthur didn’t really know what to do with that realization, so he looked over to Eames and realized he was also wearing a very stylish and expensive and well-tailored tuxedo, and he looked very, very good in it. Arthur always preferred when Eames dressed up rather than out, though he couldn’t recall the last time he looked this attractive, and that thought was enough for him to do a mental side-step and turn his attention to anything else.

The anything else happened to be the very opulent estate they were in the courtyard of and the very pricy car they were standing next to, and he realized he had, once again, completely underestimated the situation, and that was something like a punch in the gut.

Eames immediately raised his hands, taking a placating, defensive stance, apparently because of the look on Arthur's face he wasn't even aware he was wearing. 

"Now before you accuse me of just wanting to faff about as a spy --"

"Dick around as James Bond, you mean."

"Faff about as a spy who just so happens to be in MI6 because I am British, and James Bond is technically thought to be from Scotland, by the way," Eames continued in a long-suffering voice purely for Arthur's benefit; it was an impressive tidbit of esoteric trivia, and it made Arthur's mouth quirk upward in an involuntary smile the way Eames tried to pretend otherwise. "Let me just say that there are no villains or supervillains or moon bases or pits of sharks or anything like that planned for today." Finally lowering his hands, Eames straightened, and Arthur could feel his own skepticism fairly roiling beneath the surface of his skin.

"Really," he said, and sure enough, it was dripping off each syllable of the word, overflowing from his mouth in obvious waves. "That doesn't seem quite your style." Eames liked guns even more than Arthur, possibly more than the whole southern half of America, and he liked them big. 

"And yet, here we are," Eames replied, spreading his hands wide as though to encompass the whole of the empty courtyard.

"So what are we doing here, if there's no bad guys and no guns?"

"Ahhh, I didn't say there were no guns."

It took him five seconds and two blinks between staring at Eames to get it, and in the end, it was the car that did it. The James Bond car.

"Fucking son of a bitch," he said, for the second time that day.

"Come on, tell me you've never wanted to drive this car. With the rocket jets and the oil that comes out of the exhaust pipe? It can turn into a submarine, for Christ's sake."

"Does it come with a shoephone?"

"Not the same," Eames said, raising a finger. "Don't be an arsehole."

"So this whole thing was just a ploy to blow things up from various types of vehicles in various spectacular ways," Arthur finished, and he had to work to make that sound like a worse idea than it actually was. Eames could tell, and he was already grinning.

"Are you getting in the car, or aren't you?"

This time, Arthur admitted to himself it was fun. Then again, they'd been blowing up various national landmarks without repercussions or casualties for the better part of an hour and he'd be hard pressed to pretend that wasn't fun. The car was also really, really fast and London, or what Eames had dreamed up as a passable facsimile of London, had a lot of really tight corners.

"Does Bond have any crazy planes?" Arthur asked right as they took one of those corners at a high enough speed for two wheels to become partially detached from the road. He had just enough time to watch Eames's face light up at the question before a body appeared out of nowhere in front of them and exploded all over the hood and shattered the windshield as the car impacted with it at eighty miles an hour.

He was fairly sure Eames screamed, or else Arthur did; he couldn't be certain. Suddenly, there were people everywhere - in the street, on the sidewalk, straight in front of them, and Eames immediately slammed on the brakes. The car went into a wide tailspin, and Arthur had the sickening impression of dull thuds impacting with the exterior and then rolling beneath the chassis until the car finally skidded to a stop.

"What the fuck?" That definitely came from Arthur, and he felt shaky as he pushed himself off of the passenger window. Ahead, through the streaked and shattered windshield, he could see people shambling toward them, grey-faced and wearing tattered eighteenth-century clothing. "I thought you said there weren't any ‘bad guys’ this time."

"There weren't," Eames said. He looked a little pale, and he was somewhat tight-lipped, but otherwise it was the only outward sign Arthur could see of him being rattled at all. His hair wasn't even mussed. "Why would I put vampires in a James Bond fantasy?" 

"Do I really have to point out the ridiculousness of that statement to you right now?" He felt a little sick, and his head hurt where it had impacted with the window, and he watched Eames lean forward and press a button on the dash. There was a whirr as two machine guns appeared from over the headlights and opened fire.

"Arthur, if you liked the vampires that much, all you had to do was say so."

"I did not do this," he said.

"Well I certainly didn't," Eames said, and reached into his coat, producing an HK handgun with too large of a barrel to be fully functional but which Arthur had no doubt at all would fire. "Ah, well. Carpe diem."

Arthur suspected that this was Eames's not-so-subtle way of changing the subject. They spent the next two hours trying out every single one of the car's 'special features' on the rampaging hoard, and when they finally woke up, Arthur was exhausted enough to fall into a real sleep almost immediately. 

 

During the day, Arthur watched Eames come and go, sometimes staying in and working on their fledgling passports and sometimes going out for supplies, meetings or documents. Arthur didn’t have much to do, in spite of Eames occasionally trying to give him busywork, and one day sending him out to procure a passport photo, and he spent a lot of the time inside the flat (or outside of it, in the neighborhood Starbucks) staring at his computer screen. When Eames took breaks Arthur often saw him scribbling very intently in a college-ruled notebook warped with coffee stains, but he never bothered to ask what Eames was writing in it.

He did ask once, when the boredom got unbearable, how long Eames thought they’d be stuck here, and Eames had replied, deadpan and without looking up from the photo he was placing, “Forging documents takes time. Rest assured I am expediting the process as much as I am able.”

At night, Eames dreamed for them, and Arthur soon discovered the things he was writing in that little notebook were ideas and schematics, which was oddly attractive. Arthur was less and less reluctant to go under now – dreaming became the one thing he had to look forward to, though that one fact alone made him feel quite useless – and he rarely argued with any feeling when Eames shut his folios and turned to the PASIV. Over the course of the next five days he showed an impressive array of creativity, from zombies, to knights of the round, to underwater city exploration in a sphere Arthur was certain would never actually work, to ancient historical wars Arthur was entirely sure were purely for his benefit, to high fantasy Arthur wasn’t entirely sure wasn’t for Eames’s.

And then, all at once, Eames was busy and gone for most of the morning and afternoon, and for a few days Arthur was alone. When he came back in the evening, Eames seemed very tired and didn't show any inclination toward pulling out the PASIV. Arthur didn't ask for it because he just couldn't bring himself to do so, and he was afraid of what Eames would say if he did. He was testy about being teased on the best of days, but right now, about this, he was fairly sure if Eames said anything he would explode all over the walls in a rain of vitriol. He felt spun too tight, thread wound with no hope of a release in tension, and he spent nights lying awake in bed, thinking about the job, the phone records, his failure, the PASIV, Eames, everything.

He needed to get out of that living room, so he went for a walk, and he ate at a restaurant down the street with very good jerk chicken, and it improved his outlook a little, but when he got back to the apartment everything was just as it had been and he struggled not to allow his mood to plummet once again.

And then he saw Eames was there, and he had the PASIV out, and he felt stupid but Arthur could have cried over it. He didn’t, but it made him feel like the biggest idiot alive, because he was a grown man trying with the aid of another grown man to escape a bounty, only he wasn't doing shit except messing around in fantasy dreams and being emotional when he couldn't. He was utterly worthless.

"Do you like superheroes?" Eames said without preamble, and Arthur felt his eyes narrow instinctively at the question.

"What kind?"

The question obviously caught Eames off guard, and he blinked at Arthur for one long moment.

"The jumping off buildings in tight clothing kind?"

"So like, Adam West Batman or Joel Schumacher Batman?"

Eames's eyes twinkled and he crossed his arms, and Arthur got the distinct impression he knew where he was going with this.

"Does it really matter?"

"Yes, it does really matter, because I'm not going under only to wake up in a red spangly unitard and green tights."

"But you'd look so cute."

"Fuck you."

Eames laughed at that. "Okay, so you'd rather have the be-nippled purple chestplate, then?"

"No," he immediately snapped, realizing the depth and breadth of his error, and seeing it in his mind's eye for one horrible moment. 

"Well, then, I'm afraid we are at an impasse."

Arthur paused and thought. The fact he was even considering it was a testament to how far he'd come toward accepting the fantasies, and how much he looked forward to them, in spite of how guilty he felt for wasting time even more after he'd spent the entire day doing nothing. He took a shallow breath, and let it out through his nose.

"You let me make up my own costume, and I'll come with you," he said, and he watched Eames's eyes narrow like they did when he was playing poker and someone had just raised the stakes.

"Capes are required."

"No deal."

"Capes or bodysuit. Don't be cheap about it."

"All right," Arthur said, his own eyes narrowing in response. "Fine."

When he came to, they were standing on the roof of a very tall, stepped building, similar to the Empire State Building only with about three dozen more gargoyles and almost as many flying buttresses. Arthur wondered if this is what Eames thought of New York or if he was taking a more traditional graphic novel approach and making everything as gritty as he could. For his costume, Arthur had gone the more realistic route, with body pads over a tight suit of thick but breathable athletic fabric. Everything was black, and just to make Eames happy, he'd added the final touch of a fitted rubber eye mask. When he glanced over, he saw Eames looking at him in a way that, under any other circumstances, Arthur would have termed as 'appreciatively.' Now, however, that word made him blush to think about, because it was Eames, so he didn't think about it at all, and turned away and stepped to the edge of the building. He barely had a chance to look Eames’s costume over, and was left with impressions of black and a trench coat. 

"Okay," Arthur said, because he was not afraid of heights, within reason, but this far exceeded reason, even if it was a dream and he was fairly sure he knew what Eames intended to do with a building this large in a dream. "So...you brought us here to base jump? Off of this?" Arthur looked over the edge; distantly below, the lights on the street twinkled. They were too far away to count.

"Yes."

"Eames," Arthur began, and he had a curious feeling of deja vu; he wondered, briefly, why he even still bothered arguing when they both knew he was going to give in anyway. "Listen. I know this is a dream, but if we miss, we're still going to hit the ground and wake up, and 'impacting with pavement at high speed' isn't something I really need to add to my list of Ways I Have Died." 

"All you have to do is free your mind, you know."

"Wait a minute." Arthur rounded then, and crossed his arms over his chest, which was a difficult thing to do over body armor. "I thought you said this was superheroes."

Eames seemed a little taken aback, and glanced to the side once before replying. "I did."

"But you just quoted _The Matrix_."

"I don't know what you're talking about. I told you I don't watch movies."

"You did and you do, you liar. What about James Bond?"

Eames opened his mouth, and paused. "I don't watch new movies."

It took Eames the better part of five minutes to get Arthur to jump off the building, and only because he promised that he would make sure Arthur's grappling hook would connect with its target, no matter what. Arthur took a breath, and tried to act like his heart wasn't racing.

"I'm going to dislocate my goddamn shoulder," he muttered, before taking a running start and leaping off the side.

The first five seconds were sheer panic, the scream of the wind and the lurch of a new fall, but after that Arthur's adrenaline kicked in, it wasn't so different from the skydiving he'd done once in college on a dare. Except there was no parachute, no tandem instructor, and the threat of imminent death at end. Even still, though, it was a thrill like nothing else, and Arthur took a few moments to experience it, to streamline his body, even to do a quick somersault. Suddenly, he understood why Eames made the building so tall. 

But the spires below were coming up quickly, and with them the cement, and he made a grab for the grappling hook gun at his belt. He picked out a building straight ahead, close enough he had no chance of missing it, even without Eames's help. He aimed carefully at one of the building's arches, and fired. The hook went out without a hitch at high speed.

And then...the building was gone. Arthur watched the hook arc over where it had once been, and then begin its slow descent toward the ground.

"Shit!" The scream was lost to the wind around his ears, and he began to flail. He knew, logically, distantly, that he could make another gun if he needed, pick another building, but creating in someone else's dream required concentration at the best of times, and right now he was tumbling at terminal velocity toward the cement. This was going to hurt, and he took one of his last moments to resolutely curse Eames for thinking this up and himself for agreeing to do it.

The shock of impact took the breath out of his lungs in a very painful way, but it wasn't the brief, bone-crushing pain of landing on pavement. There was an arm around his torso, and he was suddenly going up instead of down. Arthur had the dim awareness of the truly rattled: someone had caught him, and that someone had to be Eames.

Eames deposited the pair of them on the rooftop of a shorter building nearby - the landing wasn't perfect, but it was pretty good, and Arthur only rolled once. When he righted himself, his pulse was hammering so hard in his ears he could barely hear his own thoughts.

"Eames, what in the fuck—”

"I'm sorry," Eames said immediately, and it dawned on Arthur that he looked almost as rattled as Arthur did. His eyes were wide and he was panting where he knelt on the tarred paper of the rooftop. "I didn't do that, Arthur, I swear to god I didn't." His earnestness made Arthur pause, and took the fire out of his anger; for a minute he just sat there and focused on calming his breathing. From the look on Eames's face, he expected not to be believed.

"It's all right," Arthur said at last, and he shook his head. "I...uh. I don't know what happened, but let's just forget about it, all right?"

"We can leave if you want," Eames said, and reached for something under his jacket. He actually seemed concerned, and it was that one expression that made Arthur raise his hand.

"No, it's all right, really. I...just maybe no more base jumping for now."

Eames stared at him for a moment, his lips pursed. And then, slowly, they curled into a smile.

"Batman does have that plane..."

Arthur grinned. "All right. But I get to drive this time."

That night, Arthur packed away the PASIV as he always did, with methodical and practiced movements. He’d started insisting on cleaning it after every use long ago, not because he didn’t trust Eames, but because he found the routine soothing. Flushing the tubing, rewinding the long cording back into the case, swapping out the cannulas and the needles, cleaning the vials – all of these were motions he could control, and found reassuring. The PASIV was a familiar thing with no expectations of him, a small unchanging responsibility in a frequently turbulent world. Arthur needed that, right now. Perhaps more now than ever.

His movements were mechanical as he thought of his job. Of his reputation. He thought of the mistakes he’d made in the past, small and big, and the repercussions of each of them. He thought of the Fischer job, of the way he’d fucked up there, and how that one mistake as well as everyone’s misplaced trust had endangered the whole team. After that, Arthur had been doubly careful to vet everyone he worked with and fully research all of his potential clients. He hadn’t really trusted anyone after the Fischer job, except for Ariadne, and Eames.

Somehow, he ended up working with Eames more often than not, perhaps because Arthur was so picky about who he would team with, and perhaps because they’d always worked well together in spite of their bickering. Arthur liked working with Eames, and he liked the jobs Eames found and brought to him, and it was easy, little by little, to simply begin working exclusively with him. There was an easiness there, a reassurance of the familiar.

Arthur knew he’d been lulled by that. He’d stopped being so critical, because around Eames that was nearly impossible. And then he’d gone and fucked everything up again. Only this time, the stakes felt far higher, and Arthur couldn’t bring himself to understand why, or what exactly the stakes had become.

“Arthur.”

The voice startled him; he looked up to find Eames standing in the doorway of his small bedroom, watching him. Arthur had no idea how long he’d been there.

“We should talk about what happened tonight, and the night before.” Eames was frowning, and Arthur couldn’t recall the last time he’d seen him show the same concern for something as was on his face right then. He wished he wouldn’t.

“What do you mean?” He trained his gaze on the metal conduit in front of him; its sides were clean, but Arthur polished them like they weren’t.

“You know what I mean.” Eames’s voice cut through Arthur’s effort to evade him like the sharpest of knives, and he could feel it segmenting him and laying him out. The intimacy of it made him defensive, angry, embarrassed. “At first I thought you were just messing around down there, but after tonight…” Arthur could feel him pausing, expecting, waiting, and he stood still, his lips pursed tight.

“Arthur, if something’s wrong—”

In one smooth motion, Arthur replaced the conduit and closed the PASIV with a sharp click. He looked up just in time to see the startled expression on Eames’s face quickly give way to a carefully-schooled impassiveness.

“Nothing’s wrong,” he said, his voice brisk and cool.

“I’ve seen how depressed you’ve been.”

“Well then, maybe you should stop watching me.” The words came out too quick and harsh; Arthur could not change them in time to stop the way Eames straightened in their wake, his face going hard. Arthur immediately regretted his tone.

“I’m sorry. I’m fine, I’m just stressed. It’s been a long week.”

From the way Eames stared, as though he was a core of familiar emotions and secrets surrounded by glass, Arthur could tell he did not believe him.

“Arthur,” Eames began again, but Arthur was already walking past him, to his own room, wrapping his feelings up tight in an effort to escape that gaze.

“Goodnight, Eames,” he said, and shut the door.

 

The next morning Arthur slept late, and when he finally got up he did not expect to find Eames sitting at the little kitchen table with his notebook and the briefcase next to him. The surprise stopped him briefly in his doorway, and for a fleeting instant he had a comical mental picture of an intervention led by the PASIV before the image dissolved and Arthur was left with nothing but confusion at the ridiculousness of his own subconscious.

“Morning,” Eames said, taking a sip from the coffee cup sitting next to him. Where there was one cup, there was more, and Arthur gravitated to the coffee maker like it was a singularity. “Or, more appropriately, afternoon.”

“I didn’t know we were keeping tabs on one another’s sleeping habits.”

“Well, we are, rather, aren’t we?” Eames said, and Arthur turned to look at Eames with a raised eyebrow. There was a curious expression on his face Arthur couldn’t parse, almost as though he was excited, or nervous.

“I’ve been working on something for a while,” he said, and he barely even had to gesture toward his notebook for Arthur to understand what he meant. He’d been working on a dream for them. “I thought today was as good as any day to show you.”

“This early?” He glanced at his watch; it was, in fact, after noon. Not early in the scheme of Arthur getting up at a reasonable hour, but certainly early for this. “Don’t you have things you need to go out and do today?”

“No,” Eames said, and his expression was entirely unreadable. He was being evasive. “Not today.”

Arthur squinted. There was something Eames wasn’t saying, and the fact that Eames was trying to tell him he had no other responsibilities struck as a discordant truth in his head. He wondered how much of “Eames not doing anything today” had to do with their conversation from the night before and Eames being worried about him. The idea made him vaguely upset to think about, and irritable.

“Uh-huh,” he said, and in such a way as to make it plain he did not, in fact, believe him.

“Come now, darling, humor me,” was Eames’s response, and Arthur briefly and ineffectually hated him, both for the pet name, and because he would, of course, always humor him, and Eames knew it.

It was immediately obvious to Arthur how long Eames had been working on building the basis for this dream when he woke up inside of a lush, verdant, warm tropical jungle full of birdsong and the heavy smell of flowers. Eames had put them, as near as Arthur could tell, in clothing straight out of _Raiders of the Lost Ark_ , though Eames seemed to be the only one who’d gotten a machete, though both of them had several guns and Arthur had a pair of very sharp knives.

“What are we doing here?” Arthur said with a frown. It was hot, but not in a distractingly uncomfortable way.

“Exploring,” Eames said. “Come on.”

“If we’re only going to be exploring, what are the guns for?” Arthur watched Eames’s eyes shift to the side immediately before his lips pursed into a smile that managed to come off as almost completely believable.

“You never know.”

The world Eames had created was certainly breathtaking, and quite remarkable in its construction – Eames led him through the jungle and across tundras, from one environment to another, some with populations and buildings or castles, and some with virtually no one at all; the way in which spaces melded and pushed and formed into one another was unlike anything Arthur had seen in lucid dreaming. The world felt expansive, endless, but they crossed it in fairly short periods of time. Arthur tried to enjoy it, but the longer he was there the more agitated he became, mostly because he wondered how much of it Eames had done because he was concerned for him, and how much of it had been time Eames could have spent focusing on something more important than him. Arthur was coming to realize just how much of what Eames did he did to show to him, and at any other point that would have made him feel appreciated. Right now it made him feel like a child who needed to be entertained.

It didn’t help that the dream seemed to shift and change as Arthur went through it. At first it was just an overall impression Arthur had sometimes, a vague threatening feeling, and when it started he cleared his throat and tried to ignore it. But then things started to happen, and there was no longer any way to pretend. The dream was changing, and it was changing around Arthur specifically.

Roots rose up in his path and tripped him. In a temple ruin, a line of dancing ladies in a frieze changed spontaneously into archers with tiny stone arrows they launched into his shoulder blades. Eames spent ten minutes removing them before they moved on, and if Arthur’s temper was bad before, it slowly became more and more volcanic. In the arctic space, Eames conjured the pair of them coats and then shot three wolves that appeared out of nowhere as Arthur pulled his on. In a mountainous area otherwise straight out of a fairy tale, they were beset upon by a host of snakes that, by all rights, shouldn’t have been able to survive in the cool weather. Eames, valiantly trying to salvage the situation, took them on to a futuristic city with rounded, gleaming buildings, but they were almost immediately attacked by a group of teenagers riding what looked to be self-propelled, hovering scooters. When Eames tried to wave them off with his own weapon, one of them pulled out what Arthur could only have described as a Buck Rogers laser and fired at him, hitting him in the chest just above his right pectoral. It burned like acid.

“Fuck!” Eames shouted, and made a twisting motion with his hand – the dream around them gave a sickening lurch and suddenly they were alone atop a cliff in the midst of a desert wasteland. It was breathtaking in its scope, as so many things here had been, expansive in the way a natural dream never was, in the way a filmmaker or game programmer would strive for but only rarely achieve. In the distance, the obsidian spires of a smooth glass castle were outlined against the setting sun, but even at a distance something about it seemed wrong. It was smoldering, the details obscured in a curtain of smoke, and Arthur was fairly sure that was not how things were supposed to be.

Everything felt unstable. There was a trembling, an almost imperceptible vibration below their feet, like the hum of distant, silent machinery. Arthur stared at Eames for a moment, but then Eames shook his head and turned, making his way off a bit further up the cliff, as though he had something he wanted to say but didn’t think he should. The wind picked up as Arthur watched him go, and as he looked up he realized that thick, grey storm clouds were moving in – or rather, the clouds that already filled the sky were being overtaken by the smoke, like water being clouded by ink, roiling into something threatening.

Arthur knew immediately that it was his fault. The sky looked just like he felt. Just like everything else that had gone wrong in these dreams, it was all his doing. He watched Eames pause a few yards away, bruised and filthy and silent. Just then he was tired of Eames not pushing him, tired of Eames trying to relax him, tired of Eames watching him, obviously thinking about him and never saying a damn thing of any substance about whatever it was that he thought.

“Is there something that you wanna say to me?” he called after him, and there was a sharp pain in his leg from where he’d fallen earlier as he took a few difficult steps after him over uneven terrain.

Eames turned to look at him, his face masked by that infuriating inscrutability he seemed to be able to muster up no matter the circumstances, and said, “Nothing except that I think there are probably some things that you need to say to me, Arthur.”

That was the truth, and Arthur knew it, but he hadn’t even said the things Eames wanted to hear to himself, not in any kind of honest way. His response was automatic. “Really,” he said, and he could feel anger bubbling up in him, though he knew logically that Eames didn’t deserve it. He couldn’t stop himself. “And what might those things be?”

Eames turned to face Arthur only then, taking a step toward him – perhaps to be heard better over the ever-increasing strength of the wind. There was rain over the desert now, a grey shroud in the distance, moving across the impossibly vast space of the dreamscape, and the wind carried with it the hot, moist scent of the downpour.

“Why,” he said, raising his voice just slightly, “are you beating yourself up over this? Don’t think I don’t know what this is, Arthur. The cracks in my dreams that I didn’t put there. The mysteriously disappearing skyscraper, your rogue projections, the fact that you’re standing here limping and bloody when I intended for no such thing to happen. I can’t control those things because they’re your problems manifesting, and all of them are hurting you, not me. I want to know why.”

“Because this whole thing is my fault!” Arthur was nearly shouting. He didn’t care. “I fucked it up. I had one job, and that was to see that the whole thing was a fucking setup, and I failed.”

“And how exactly would you have seen that, Arthur?”

“The phone records! The fact that the client had been in contact with Auvray!”

Arthur was very outwardly angry, but Eames remained infuriatingly calm. He should’ve been upset. He should’ve been taking it out on Arthur. Instead he only shook his head. “A client who’s contacted multiple extractors? Hardly impossible to explain. Hardly unusual. You didn’t even know about her history with me, and even I wouldn’t have assumed that it meant the job was a setup. I would have assumed that it meant that Auvray turned the job down, which of course would have been exactly what Leslie would have told us. You know that, Arthur.”

“Don’t tell me what I know!” The first drops of rain were falling, sporadic but heavy against Arthur’s face in a way that threatened the whole sky breaking open. He felt on the verge of breaking with it.

“Don’t lie to me!” Eames snapped, a bark that managed to startle Arthur. “You didn’t react this way on the Fischer job. I want to know what the difference is!”

Arthur jolted forward awkwardly on his bad leg that was now throbbing with the pain that had only gotten worse since he hurt it. Eames was still on slightly higher ground, and Arthur hated the fact that he had to look up at him. “The difference is that this was my job! Our job! I didn’t want to work with Cobb; I did it because he had no one else, but you don’t need me!”

Eames’s face went slack for a moment, and he was entirely still, and at the same time Arthur’s stomach tightened and he realized just how much those last four words had said. At that moment, there was a rumble of thunder and the drizzle became a downpour, and Arthur was almost too distracted to even curse his apparent inability to keep himself from tearing apart Eames’s dreamscapes. He didn’t have the energy.

“Arthur…” Eames said, and Arthur responded by turning to walk away.

Thanks to his leg, however, it was no trouble at all for Eames to catch him by the arm and turn him back. “Do you really think this changes anything between us?” Eames asked. Arthur wouldn’t meet his eyes, but Eames didn’t let go of his elbow. “Why do you think I’m doing this? Why do you think I’m bothering to take time to try to make you happy in the only way I can think of? Of course I need you, you git; it would take a hell of a lot more than one bad job to make me reconsider our partnership.”

Arthur finally glanced at him, just to make sure he was serious. They’d never discussed being partners, and they’d certainly never used the word. They were just two people who worked together, usually without anyone else, more or less all the time, for over a year now. And yeah, that was important to Arthur. Thanks to Dom’s fucked up life and questionable choices, he’d been at his wits’ end when the Fischer job came along, and it was only the high from achieving the impossible that’d kept him around until he fell in with Eames. He didn’t want to work with anyone else, didn’t want to worry about finding reliable people, didn’t want to fight or handhold or herd cats.

But it was more than that. When Arthur thought about his fuckup, about what he was afraid of, it wasn’t really losing Eames as a business partner.

“I could’ve gotten you killed,” he said at last, reaching up pull his soaking wet bangs away from his forehead, futilely trying to wipe the water from his eyelashes.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Eames argued, “and even if it had been, it’s an occupational hazard.”

“Fuck you!” Arthur exclaimed, and he was shocked to find how angry that made him, but he grabbed Eames’s jacket and shook him, and it left him clinging to that same jacket for balance because the pain in his leg was so awful and he was drenched through to the skin, but he didn’t even care. “Fuck you and your fucking pragmatism! You don’t get to brush this off when I love you and I could’ve lost you!”

There was a moment of deafening silence, silence that somehow even overpowered the deluge, and maybe it was Arthur’s mortification that did it or maybe it was something in Eames, or maybe it was something as simple as the sudden saturation of unstable desert ground, but the cliff gave way then, and Arthur was barely aware of it before the ground was gone from under him.

He started awake, sitting up with a jolt. He found himself eye to eye with Eames, who was sitting across from him, both their expressions a bit wild and their breaths coming heavy and fast. There was a moment in which neither moved, and then they went for their IVs in the same instant. Arthur practically tore his out, copious practice doing it in a rush the only thing keeping him from making a mess of it, and he scrambled to his feet and made a break for his bedroom. Thanks to Eames’s having to round the coffee table, Arthur managed to make it, slam the door, and lock it behind himself before Eames could catch up.

He knew it was childish, but he felt like a child just then, embarrassed and afraid and completely foolish. He might very well have just ruined the best thing he had going in his life – the only thing he had going in his life, really – all because he’d lost his temper and couldn’t keep his stupid mouth shut. That was what Eames did to him; he made him lose control.

Slumping against the door, he slid down it until he was sitting on the warped floorboards and buried his face in his hands just as Eames’s footsteps creaked on the other side of the door. He knocked, and Arthur sighed. Of course it was too much to hope that Eames would just leave him alone.

“Arthur, you know you can’t just say that to me and then run away, right?”

“I just did,” Arthur countered, and he could practically hear Eames’s eyes roll in the second of silence that followed.

“You can’t stay in there forever.”

“I’ve already cased this whole apartment; there is a drainage pipe I can definitely make it down right outside my window.”

“Or instead of risking your neck, literally, you could open this door and talk to me like an adult.”

Arthur pouted. He sat there in his room and he pouted, and he felt especially stupid that he was alone, but he was also relieved that no one was there to witness it. “Over the last ten years I’ve found being an adult to be both unappealing and overrated. I’m sick of it. And you’re one to talk!”

“With all due respect, darling – and make no mistake, I respect you more than anyone else I’ve ever met – I’m not the one who’s locked myself in my room to avoid talking about my feelings.”

“If there’s something important you have to say, just say it!” Arthur exclaimed.

For the first time in the conversation, Eames sounded truly exasperated. “I am not going to say it through a door, Arthur! Just open it and give me thirty seconds and then if you want I’ll leave you alone!”

For a few moments, Arthur just sat there. He didn’t want to give Eames thirty seconds. He wanted to crawl under the bed and never come out and be swallowed by dustbunnies, though perhaps the particularity that desire was shaped by the fact that from his vantage point on the floor, the space under the bed occupied most of his field of vision. But he didn’t crawl under the bed, because he was an adult, because being an adult was inconvenient but it was also obligatory. He had to show up to work, he had to pay his bills, and he had to talk to Eames sooner or later.

He got up, steeled his features and braced for everything to fall apart just as it had in the dream, and he opened the door just enough to talk. “Thirty seconds.”

Eames leaned on the doorjamb, and it allowed him to stand just a bit too close as he licked his lips, wetting them with the tip of his tongue, and took a deep breath. “You were shaken by this. I’m shaken too. I know I don’t talk about it, but I think about it all the time. I can’t take watching you get shot at, not in the real world, not anymore; I’ve been trying to figure out how to tell you that after we get out of here I want to take smaller jobs. I don’t care how in-demand we are; I want to catch cheating spouses and steal the contents of wills. I’m fed up with this multinational corporate bullshit. I’m not young and stupid enough to get off on the danger anymore, and I’m not doing this for the money.

“I’d be drinking frozen cocktails on a beach and passing fake chips at casinos if I weren’t here. I’m not working exclusively with you because of your unmatched professionalism and incomparable professional skill set, Arthur. I’m doing it because I’ve wanted you since I can remember and I’ve loved you for months and I wouldn’t be extracting at all if it weren’t a way to spend time with you.”

Arthur may have forgotten to breathe just then, and he may also have forgotten everything he’d been feeling the minute before. All he could hear was his own pulse in his ears and all he could think was _God, yes, all of that._ Jobs that didn’t involve hired suits with guns, scamming casinos that wouldn’t put a bounty on you, frozen drinks on beaches. Not having to ignore the fact that he wanted Eames in every way, in his bed, in his life between jobs.

He took Eames by the nape of his neck and pulled him into the room, and Eames stumbled a bit at the suddenness, but Arthur still ended up in his arms, pressed up against him, clutching a fistful of his shirt to keep him close. “Why couldn’t we have said anything to each other before we became wanted men?” he asked lowly.

“Let’s not talk about that,” Eames replied, and he kissed Arthur hard enough to drive the thought from his mind, and Arthur welcomed the distraction; he could ignore being trapped in Canada, he could ignore the price that hadn’t shown up on their heads yet but surely would quite soon, he could ignore the shitty apartment and the broken springs in the mattress he dragged Eames onto a few minutes later. It was that easy.

 

Arthur woke up with the mid-afternoon sun shining through the threadbare cotton curtains and the clock on the nightstand telling him that he’d been passed out for about an hour. He was naked and sore and alone, which he found immediately annoying and then immediately after that a bit worrying. He crawled silently out of bed, slipped silently into last night’s pajama pants, reached silently for the gun he kept on the little shelf under the nightstand, and crept silently out into the hall. He stood just outside his door, listening for a moment.

The apartment was silent.

He sneaked down the hall, but when he reached the living room Eames was there, holding his own gun and peering between the curtains of the front window that overlooked the street. Somehow he was aware of Arthur’s arrival even without looking up, and he said very quietly, “There is a matte black BMW sedan parked across the street.”

In some neighborhoods that would not have been a cause for immediate concern. They were not, however, currently in one of those neighborhoods.

“How long?”

“Five minutes. Watched it pull up while I was putting the kettle on. Haven’t seen anyone get out, but that very likely means they did while I was trying to find my gun.”

“Shit.” They were probably in trouble. They were probably in trouble and Arthur had messy hair and nothing but a pair of drawstring pants on and his ass hurt, and to make matters worse Eames was sitting there in an inside-out t-shirt and boxers with stupid ducks on them. They were not currently prepared for this. He licked his lips and glanced over at the PASIV where it was still laid out on the coffee table. Eames seemed to think the same thing at the same time, because he turned and glanced significantly at the PASIV, then at Arthur. Arthur nodded and went for it, packing it up in record time while Eames turned his attention, and his aim, to the front door.

There was a knock just as Arthur snapped the case shut, which caused him to instinctively jump up, taking the PASIV with him and aiming at the door as he snuck out of the immediate line of sight and ducked halfway into the hall. Eames was already pressed up against the wall next to the door. Arthur’s heart was pounding, and he couldn’t remember ever being so terrified even though he’d been in much worse situations. He knew, as he watched Eames and Eames glanced over at him, exactly why that was.

“I meant it. I love you,” he whispered suddenly, without really thinking about it, because he sort of had to say it. They probably weren’t going to die, but they were maybe going to die, and it was the only important thing.

“I know,” Eames replied.

“ _What_?”

But then Eames was moving to grab the handle, and Arthur would get him back for that but right now he just had to make sure they lived long enough for him to do so, and he tightened his grip and leveled his gun and Eames threw open the door.

“Am I… interrupting something?” Saito asked, looking back and forth between them in a way that very obviously took in everything from their guns to Eames’s duck boxers to the fact that Arthur was shirtless and carrying the PASIV under one arm. Arthur, in that moment, wanted to cry with the sudden relief, and he kept himself from doing so by scrunching up in his face in a way that probably came off as somewhere between displeased and confused. He only remembered to lower his weapon belatedly, after Eames did so.

Just then the kettle that had still been simmering away on the range began to emit a piercing whistle, and Saito’s lips curved into a little smile that gave the impression of genuine pleasure under a layer of habitual detachment. “I see that I’ve arrived at just the right time. I take mine black, thank you,” he said, and he stepped inside.

“If I might inquire, Mr. Saito,” Eames said as he settled down in one of the living room chairs two minutes later, “how did you end up here?”

“A car; my driver is waiting outside,” Saito replied without any hint of irony, sitting back in the middle of the stained old sofa trailing his cheap teabag around in an old coffee mug and still managing to look just as he might have on a leather couch with a china cup and a silver infuser. He continued straight on with, “As I am sure you know, even after the split-up of Fischer Morrow, competition in the energy sector has remained quite fierce.”

Arthur was keenly aware that he was sitting across the table from a man wearing a suit that probably cost as much as Arthur’s car, and he himself was shirtless and, for some reason he couldn’t quite explain, still clutching the PASIV in his lap. He blamed it on the fact that he’d been fairly rattled when he dropped into his chair and now couldn’t figure out a way to put it on the table without calling greater attention to the fact that he was still holding it.

Eames gave him a surreptitious look that somehow managed to convey that he thought it looked like Arthur was awkwardly concealing an erection. Saito didn’t appear to notice.

“Our other competitors have been emboldened by the breakup,” he continued. “Always trying to grab a larger piece of the pie. We, of course, were prepared to step in first, but that does not mean that Proclus can simply rest on its laurels. Waiting around for others to make the first move did not get me where I am today.”

“Mm, yes, your driver did,” Eames said.

Arthur ran a hand over his face in exasperation, but Saito’s eyes only crinkled a bit at the corners. “I am always looking for ways to maintain a competitive advantage. Two weeks ago an extraction was attempted on my CFO. It was unsuccessful, but it was the third such attempt on a high-level executive in my company in the last two years. Including, of course, your successful audition with me, Mr. Lewis.”

“You describe that job in much more generous terms than I would,” Arthur said.

“The outcome was favorable for all parties, though I suppose it is easy for me to say so when I was not the one shot in the knee,” Saito said, shrugging one shoulder. “In any case, extraction is the future. It is fast becoming a fixture in the corporate world. An inescapable reality. And I intend to secure an advantage over those who would use it against me.”

“Ah, well, there’s no such thing as a sure advantage in dreamshare,” Eames pointed out, shifting his weight in his seat and running a hand over his hair in a somewhat unsuccessful attempt to get it to lie down. “You’re dealing with a global underworld, not a regulated industry.”

“There is always an advantage for those resourceful enough to find it,” Saito said, looking at both of them in turn, his gaze keen. “If I can keep the top accountants and the top lawyers on retainer, why can’t I do the same with extractors? It’s the simple matter of finding the best and hiring them to work exclusively for me, militarizing my executives and stealing only what I wish to have stolen. And I knew that my idea was meant to be when I contacted Mr. Cobb and was told that the best extractors in the world were currently stuck in Canada being hunted by a multinational mining conglomerate.

“It’s not that I take delight in your misfortune; it’s simply that it must make my offer sound more enticing now that I am I sitting here telling you that I did you the personal favor of cutting a deal with Fortran Mining on your behalf, and that the accommodations I could provide you while on jobs – even jobs that do not go according to plan – would be significantly more comfortable than these.”

Arthur glanced over at Eames, their eyes meeting for a brief moment, and Arthur was about to respond with carefully restrained enthusiasm when Eames blurted out, “And our hiding out in Canada after a job gone completely off the rails doesn’t make you second-guess your assumption that we’re the best extractors in the world?”

“Jesus, Eames!” Arthur sighed, but Saito seemed unfazed.

“Everyone has their bad days. I have already seen more than enough exemplary work from both of you, and you have my full confidence. Now, my plane is not far from here; I would enjoy the opportunity to discuss this in greater depth.”

“Yeah,” Arthur said before Eames could open his fat mouth again. _Let’s talk protection,_ he thought. _Let’s talk not having bounties on our heads. Let’s talk steady income. Let’s talk retirement funds and regular time off. Let’s talk having a home and a relationship and some fucking semblance of normalcy._ He glanced over, and Eames was just staring at him, a little smile curving his lips, and Arthur couldn’t help but grin. “Yeah, let’s talk terms.”

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally dualwielder's pinch hit, but she recruited her doting wife to co-author. While we're pretty attuned to each other's writing styles, nobody's perfect, and any inconsistencies in form or feel can probably be blamed on that. Or on mood swings. Whichever!


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